


the king of all birds

by aosc



Category: Bleach
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-06-03 16:12:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6617365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Ain't no coward," Shinji mutters, and pushes to his feet. Something parasitical is pushing on his skin, and his body quakes. He sways. Sakanade is sliced into the soft, bloodied mud a few feet astray. Hiyori is limp in Shihōin's grip.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>"Good," Urahara says, and shifts his weight evenly between his legs.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Slice of life; before, through, and after Aizen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

 

Shinji spits a glob of blood, and the Hollow on the inside, half clawing out of him, shrieks. He coughs something that sounds a whole lot like a chuckle, is more of a stringent of stages of pain put together and pressured out of the darker corners of him. "You can't be serious," he says.

 

Urahara Kisuke stands above him, Benihime bloodied, pink hilt and pink blade. "I'm afraid I am very, very, serious," he says.

 

Shinji dares a look over at where there is a sprawling of bodies across the dusted field, sandied and guts buried in the bunkers. At Hiyori, whose arms, wiry with scratches and raw bones, have been twisted up behind her back, the Shihōin heir at her shoulder, looking grim. "Kisuke," she warns, a foreboding - a reckoning.

 

Shinji crawls to his elbows, laughs through a few splintered ribs, coughs on the chips of them. "Ya look like the reaper's comin' for us, Shihōin-dono," he says.

 

Her mouth twists. She winds Hiyori tighter, holds her up by the strength of herself. Hiyori is limp in her grip. The rest of them are spread across the vast arena, a discordant of half monsters, and Shinji knows, through the madness threatening to send him scurrying for oblivion with each passing, tempered and quiet second, that Urahara Kisuke and the Shihōin princess are the only pair of able legs standing back between him and them and it, snapping the gates of Hell shut.

 

"Ain't no coward," Shinji mutters, and pushes to his feet. Something parasitical is pushing on his skin, and his body quakes. He sways. Sakanade is sliced into the soft, bloodied mud a few feet astray.

 

"Good," Urahara says, and shifts his weight evenly between his legs.

 


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

 

"You wanna name it," Shinji says. He pulls a drag of breath off the cigarette, and feels the air rattle around in the lungs of his gigai. Surprisingly sturdy, keeping him and the - other, steady, knit together and tempered.

 

Urahara hums. He swipes with his palm across his face, and looks sideways to Shinji, fringe temporarily on the side of his face. It makes him look younger, unfit for captaincy, Shinji thinks. Got a handful years too few on him to have those eyes, black as tar, murky now with regret and what-ifs. Only half a head ready for this, but, he figures; that's half a head better'n the rest of them.

 

"I'd try for positivity, Hirako-san," he says. "And in the wake of that - yes, I would like to put a name to its discovery."

 

"Why?" He pulls more nicotine down, into the flesh and skin suit. Catalogues how it reacts, and shuffles it to the back of his memory.

 

"Because," Urahara says, "There is not quite such humanity in any ceremony, as in the naming one."

 

Shinji looks at him; wheat straw hair and shadow of light stubble, purple beneath the eyes, calm upturn of lips. He's too amicable in the face of adversity, too willing to fall off the rails and discover what's beside the road.

 

"Well, shit," Shinji says. Somewhere beneath the suppressants, there is a storm, a fork of lightning, breaking beneath the skin and the tendons and the marrow.


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

 

He sheathes Sakanade. At his feet, rain splutters, bubbles in muddy cavities in the ground. The grass is limp, and the sky is ashening out. He hasn’t had use for the sword, but, for the lone, stricken second, he’d almost thought -

 

Sōsuke, ahead, wipes the flat of his Kyōka Suigetsu along the length of his shin. He looks back at Shinji. His fringe is slicked back from his face, glasses slightly askew on the bridge of his nose. “Are you unharmed, Captain?” he asks.

 

“Tche,” Shinji snorts. “Could ask you th’ same question, _Sō_ suke- _kun_. Ya look almost rattled.”

 

The hill they’ve stayed in continues down, far below, roils of green and growth as long as Shinji can see with his lone eye. The burn of Sōsuke’s kidō has gouged a crescent into the slope. It smells singed and of acrid earth.

 

“I wouldn’t,” replies his lieutenant, almost immediately. Behind the words are, suddenly as though he were struck with them, an almost childlike impunity - unbecoming of Aizen Sōsuke as the vice Shinji has chosen for the division - and himself. Shinji raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

 

“To allow myself to become rattled, though we certainly face some horrifying characters - it would be unwise,” Sōsuke clarifies, “It would mean to risk viewing an opponent with less than a hundred percent clarity. If I do that, it could potentially put the remainder of my party in harm’s way. By extension - also you, Captain.”

 

Shinji looks at his lieutenant. Sōsuke smears rain over his upper lip, and hooks some of his wet hair behind his ear. At his feet lay the blackened remains of a tree’s splayed roots. Farther astray, a wiry arm, limp chimeric fingers and its protruding pipe of wrist bone. Given the high density reishi in the air, the mid-level Hollows materialize and perish at a slower rate than they do in the human world. Despite this, Shinji notes, this one takes abnormally long to disperse. The slick of its blood matting Sōsuke’s shihakushō makes the fabric stick together, a gory pleat along his left leg.

 

“Psh, don’t talk smack, Sōsuke!” Shinji twists his hair spiralling over the back of his hand. Rain water sluices down his arm. He grimaces. “That kind’a talk may work on the ladies. It don’t on me.”

 

Sōsuke, obedient, mild and distressingly accordant, bows his head. “Of course not, Captain,” he agrees.

 

“Always so quick to agree, are ya.”

 

Sōsuke sheathes his zanpakutō. When he looks up at Shinji, there’s almost a discordant struck in his face - a divide, unsure of whether it should be humor, or whether it should remain impassive. “Is disobedience shown one’s superior not equal to that of a crime?” he says, striking a note between genuine and rhetorical question.

 

“Cheeky,” Shinji mutters. He tips his head towards the scene in question. “That taken care of?”

 

“To the best of my abilities, Hirako-taichō.”

 

“Eh, quit _Hirako-taichō_ -ing me. Doesn’t become ya, Sōsuke. An I ain’t that old.”

 

“No, of course not, Captain...”

 

Shinji smirks. “Thought so. Now, ya got what ya need to write up this report when we get back?”

 

Sōsuke’s eyes linger on the corpse, dematerializing now, slowly, slowly decomposing before them. He nods his head slightly, slightly, along with each of its limbs turning into pure reishi, the uncompromising act of purification uncaring of whether it were a Hollow, or a Plus. The soul is cleansed of its sins, quite regardless of how far it has gone. Dredged through the mud, or remained above ground. Shinji thinks that among the many, many ticks that Aizen Sōsuke keeps in check. The many things he hides, the many things he with intent shows - this is one that he hasn’t managed to rid himself of. An unconscious curiosity, physically manifesting.

 

He turns to Shinji, the spell breaking, “I do, Captain,” he says.

 

“Alright. Then let’s go.”

 

*  
 

 


End file.
